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the complete review - fiction

Soldiers of Salamis

by
Javier Cercas

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : decent story, but the presentation gets out of hand

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Generally very favourable

  From the Reviews:

• "Soldiers of Salamis isn't a great novel but it is worth reading for three things: the story of Miralles, the affirmation of the values that make him a hero and the opportunity to find out more than you probably ever knew before about the Spanish Civil War." - Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Age
  
  
• "Soldiers of Salamis is a great read and a moving epitaph. But Cercas's quest to get at the "truth" of what happened in Collell suffers, I think, because we never know when he is telling the truth himself." - Miranda France, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Das Pathos wird in kleinen Dosen verabreicht, Schweres und Leichtes sind locker gemischt. Daß Javier Cercas bei alledem nicht mit Kalendersprüchen zum Handwerk des Schreibens spart, mag auf die Leser sympathisch wirken: Hier predigt nicht jemand vom Olymp auf sie herab, sondern übt noch, so wie andere das Schreinern oder den Bauchtanz üben." - Paul Ingendaay, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "The narrator is fascinated by the way memory congeals into history: the insidious process by which personal narratives become part of a past that can no longer be verified, and is therefore taken to be the truth, even though it is only one possible version of what actually happened. (.....) (F)rom the very outset of Soldiers of Salamis it is plain that this is a literary quest, the hope being that the fictional invention will be more convincing in the end than any biographical memoir." - Nick Caistor, The Guardian
  
  
• "(I)t takes us down the road that leads a Spanish writer from cynical indifference through antiquarian fascination to wholehearted empathy -- a progress that gives this book its singular, and satisfying shape. More than 60 years on, Cercas has written a classic novel -- though a consistently droll and high-spirited one -- about the filtration of war's tragedies through memory and myth." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
  
  
• "It is difficult to give Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas the serious attention it deserves without making the novel sound ponderous and unappealing. This is a shame. The book is funny and gripping and also a tear-jerker in the best sense of the word." - Rebecca Pawel, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Soldiers of Salamis is compelling because there are no heroes. Or perhaps because each man proves himself capable, if not of heroics, at the very least of behaving honourably." - Amanda Hopkinson, The Observer
  
  
• "It is rare for novels in translation to achieve a wide readership here. This one really should, not only because it is such a remarkable book, but also because oversimplified ideas about the rights and wrongs of the Spanish Civil War still have a powerful effect on European cultural and political thinking." - Anne Chisholm, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Cercas’s sly manoeuvrings between fact and fiction are not the postmodernist’s unmasking of universal meaninglessness; they represent instead a hugely involving affirmation of literature as path to truth." - Chris Power, The Times
  
  
• "His quest for their lost names and identities, told with all the tension of a detective story, brings about the recovery, in an epiphanic finale, of his own literary voice. For all its historical references, real and fabricated, Javier Cercas's engrossing novel is, most fundamentally, a chronicle of its own writing. In some of its concerns as well as in its hybridity, this novel brings to mind the work of W. G. Sebald, with whom Cercas also shares a precise prose style and a skilful narrative arrangement." - Xon De Ros, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(T)hough full of intelligent questions and memorable details, Cercas looks truth in the eye, is swayed by sentiment and turns away. Javier Cercas is fond of the long dense sentences that are characteristic of Spanish prose, and by opting to translate them into equally long, dense English sentences Anne McLean occasionally writes herself into a cul-de-sac. But her translation catches the book's tone: light, colloquial and capable of moments of lyricism." - Tim Souster, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Lange hat mich ein Buch nicht so begeistert und so empört." - Albrecht Buschmann, Die Welt
  
  
• "Soldados de Salamina is a compelling and provocative novel. The simplicity of the basic story, which by itself would have only been another article in a journal or newspaper, is turned into a profound analysis of the intricacies of writing and being a writer. Art as imitation of reality and literature as political and social compromise are but two of the issues explored." - Rosa Julia Bird, World Literature Today
  
  
• "Kurz vor Schluss erst merkt der Leser, wie kunstvoll komponiert, wie komplex es ist. Welche Räume es aufreißt, welche Tiefen es öffnet. (...) Ein großes Buch." - Christian Schüle, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       In Soldiers of Salamis Javier Cercas tells the story of a writer named Javier Cercas' efforts in trying to write a book called Soldiers of Salamis. This book is labelled a fiction, but the narrator's name is the same as that of the author and the events he wants to write about are historical.
       The episode that captures the imagination of the (semi- ?) fictional Javier Cercas occurred at the end of the Spanish Civil War, when Rafael Sánchez Mazas, a leading Falangist (and also a writer), was one of some fifty Nationalist prisoners who the Republicans machine-gunned in a mass execution. Sánchez Mazas was one of two to escape, but the Republicans immediately tried to hunt them down. Hiding close to the the site of the execution, Sánchez Mazas was discovered by a Republican soldier -- but not turned in, allowing him to truly escape (and eventually go on to briefly become a Minister Without Portfolio in the Franco government).
       Soldiers of Salamis is told in three parts. In the first, the fictional Cercas describes his growing fascination with the story. Working as a journalist, he wrote an article about the episode, and the reactions to it lead to new discoveries and suggested new possibilities of how to look at it -- and how to write about it.
       The second part is the work that eventually results, titled "Soldiers of Salamis" and describing the events that led up to the episode in 1939, what happened, and a brief conclusion about Sánchez Mazas' life afterwards (when he used what power he had to help some of those who had helped him).
       Once it's completed, Cercas find: "the book wasn't bad, but insufficient". What's missing is the key to the whole episode: the militiaman who saw Sánchez Mazas but didn't turn him in. As luck would have it, he interviews an author who tells him about a forgotten Spanish hero -- a man who, so Cercas eventually comes to believe, was at the site of the mass-execution. And so Cercas tries to hunt him down too.

       Soldiers of Salamis is a meditation on heroism, and on writing. And it is about the remembering, recording, and understanding of history, especially the many forgotten and anonymous individuals who played significant roles in the vast unknowable past.
       It's an odd book: the episode in the forest is repeated many times, a moment -- as these two men look each other in the eyes -- that Cercas sees as far more profound than just one man sparing another's life. Meanwhile, the author imposes himself on the reader far more than in most fictions, making himself a character -- and not a particularly sympathetic one either -- and making it a book about his quest as much as about the actual events he's ostensibly trying to understand and recreate.
       Cercas' descriptions of his difficulties in writing the book he wants to write (and of his somewhat sorry life in general) can get tedious, and the play on fact versus fiction (often put as little more than a question of semantics) is often forced too. Some of the explanations are amusing, but Cercas pushes the game too far. The initial exchanges are clever enough, as one with his unlikely girlfriend, Conchi:

    'I hope it's not a novel.'
    'No,' I said, very confidently. 'It's a true tale.'
    'What's that. ?'
    I explained; I think she understood.
    'It'll be like a novel,' I summed up. 'Except, instead of being all lies, it's all true.'
    'I'm glad it's not going to be a novel.'
    'Why's that ?'
    'No reason,' she answered. 'It's just that -- well, honey, I don't think imagination is really your strong suit.'

In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to claim Sánchez Mazas as Spain's first fascist, and quite correct to say he was its most influential theoretician.

'If I didn't know you were an intellectual, I'd say you were stupid.'

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Links:

• Bloomsbury publicity page
• Tusquets Editores publicity page
• Actes Sud publicity page
• Guanda publicity page

• The Age
• Caroline Angus Baker
• Barcelona Review (Spanish)
• Columbia Journal
• CritiquesLibres.com (French)
• Daily Telegraph
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German)
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Kirkus Reviews
• Lire (French)
• The Los Angeles Times
• New Partisan
• The Observer
• Publishers Weekly
• Reading Matters
• ReadySteadyBook
• satt.org (German)
• Seeing the World Through Books
• Shelf Steem
• Socialist Review
• Sunday Telegraph
• Tredynas Days
• Die Welt (German)
• Danny Yee's Book Reviews

• IMDb page

• [The Anatomy of a Moment]
• The Motive
• Outlaws
• The Speed of Light
• The Tenant

• See Index of Spanish literature

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About the Author:

       Spanish author Javier Cercas was born in 1962.

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© 2004-2016 the complete review

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